A Season’s Journey || FOR THE GREATER GOOD
Autistic team manager helps teach girls about priorities, perspective

Said Cuff: “If I yell at someone or if someone else yells at another player, he’ll stop them and say, ‘You don’t do that, or, you cannot play volleyball anymore.’ ”

Seldom does Charlie miss practice. Mondays, however, are reserved for Charlie’s other passion: music. He meets with his band — the Kingsmen — to practice and perform gigs.

Charlie plays the keyboard and is one of the vocalists for the band, composed of three other autistic children. The goal: a social experience for the boys.

“Could they even make music? No one knew. That wasn’t important, though. It was about bringing them together,” said Shawn Poole, Charlie’s mother.

“At first, he’d get on the stage — and I’m thinking to myself, how will the crowd react, no one knows — and sing with his eyes closed and a sheet of music between his face and the audience. Now, you give him a microphone and he just commands the whole entire crowd.”

Fear and trepidation set in for Sean and Bob Poole years ago when they enrolled their son at Torrey Pines. How would the Falcons community treat him? Would they be receptive? It was a risk they had to take.

“When you have a child like Charlie, as a parent, you hate to think of him being sort of on the outside, trapped on the outside and not being able to get in, so to speak,” Bob said.

“You have to be careful. There is some danger when you’re in a world that is exclusively special-education-oriented that you do kind of go off to the side and get stuck there.”

Neither parent wanted that. They reached out to teachers and the Torrey Pines community, attempting to ensure Charlie would have a positive experience.

The baseball team expedited that process. A couple of players reached out to Charlie, ushered him into managing and initiated him into the family.

Last year, one of Charlie’s teachers introduced him to Dean. He immediately welcomed Charlie and drew up responsibilities for him, hoping to make a positive difference.

“Brennan is very focused, I think, on this program being more than volleyball and about producing women with great character and volleyball as a tool for that,” Bob said.

“I think this insertion of Charlie in this has kind of led to this thinking that, hey, this is more than about just getting a scholarship. Without Brennan being committed to making this work, it wouldn’t work.”

Dean challenges Charlie to step out of his comfort zone and encourages interaction with the players as well as the coaching staff. He and Madison Dutra, senior outside hitter, have worked on ways to bypass Charlie’s sensitivity to touch, creating a way for contact through fist bumping, shoulder and elbow bumping and tapping sneakers.

“If I were to add up all the hours of planning and researching and literal hands-on effort to help Charlie and add up all the dollars spent on the therapies that have gone into helping him over the years, all of that, together, cannot equal what he has received from this experience,” Sean said.

Indirectly, the process has led to confidence and affirmation, which in turn, has helped Charlie receive a driver’s license and hopefully, in the future, a high school diploma.

The girls have learned what’s truly important in life and more about autism.

“There are some people who are suspicious that Charlie is putting us all on,” Bob said while laughing. “He’s a runner, a musician and he gets to hang out with the girls all the time. What’s better than that?”